Jacques Durand is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toulouse and an Emeritus Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Until 2012, he was a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English of the University of Toulouse Le Mirail and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Formerly, he was Professor of French and Linguistics at the University of Salford (Greater Manchester, England) where he was also the Head of the European Research Institute. He has held posts in Aberdeen, Essex, Paris and Aix-en-Provence. In 2004-2006 he was in charge of Linguistics at the CNRS Headquarters in Paris and between 2003 and 2009 he was the Director of the CLLE (Cognition Langues Langage Ergonomie) research institute (CNRS and University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès). His publications are in linguistics (French, English, general) with a focus on phonology and in Machine Translation. As a specialist of phonology, he has been the co-director of two major international research programmes on French and English: PFC (Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés et structure) et PAC (Phonologie de l’anglais contemporain : usages, variétés et structure). He is also the editor of the Oxford University Press series ‘Phonology of the World’s Languages’.